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Old Wine in New Bottles

The Persistence of Narrative Structures in the Historiography of the Mfecane and the Great Trek

NORMAN ETHERINGTON

If Julian Cobbing is right in his contention that the root causes of the mfecane lie not in the Zulu kingdom but in disruptive forces emanating from Mozambique and the Cape, then rethinking the mfecane means rethinking the Great Trek. One of the oddest circumstances in historical writing about South Africa is that those contemporaneous phenomena, each of which has been called 'the central event in South African history', have been treated as isolated occurrences. According to the dictates of a peculiar historiographical apartheid, the only recognised linkage is the supposition that the mfecane cleared the highveld of people at the very moment the Voortrekkers decided to go and live there. This essay offers some revisionist propositions about the 1830s developed from a bird's-eye view of the historiographical landscape. The word 'revision' is used in its original sense. No new archival research findings which change our picture of the past are reported here. Instead, some familiar and obvious sources are re-examined with a view to changing standard versions of history. In particular, an attempt is made to explain the remarkable persistence of certain narrative structures in accounts of the Great Trek and mfecane written by historians working in different periods and informed by dramatically different ideologies.

When Cobbing finds the same story repeated in different eras, he suspects historians of complicity in a lie which serves the interests of dominant groups in South African society.¹ Such explanations, whether cast in terms of interest group theory or structuralist theory, have much to be said for them but are less than totally satisfying because they have flourished not just at home but also abroad. Why should foreign scholarship dance to the favourite tunes of South African politicians, miners and farmers? What could move John Omer-Cooper in Nigeria or Kent Rasmussen in California to serve among the legions of 'settler history'?² Are there not other possible reasons for the persistence of certain story-lines?

Narrative Structures that have Shaped the Trek and the Mfecane

In many ways the Great Trek and mfecane are twins beneath the skin. Each was retrospectively discovered by nationalists and historians. (Decades passed before the 'movement of the emigrant farmers' was inscribed as the Great Trek; the word mfecane first appears in history books in the twentieth century.) Each has been touted as the 'central event' or 'centrepiece' of the history of a people.³ Each, indeed, has been held to express the peculiar genius of a people. Each has been characterised as a movement of people out of touch and out of tune with the surging tides of nineteenth-century capitalist development. With a few exceptions, historians have accepted each as a unique event in human history.⁴

Both the Zulu kingdom and the Trekker republics are conventionally treated as states which desired more than anything else to be left alone once they had achieved their initial objectives. The similarities do not end there. Each phenomenon has been reified in both academic and non-academic publications. Their historicity is no more doubted than that of the Hebrew Exodus or the French Revolution. Although only a tiny number of historians have tackled either movement as a whole, swarms of industrious researchers have beavered away within the paradigms specifying precisely who was who, who did what, where and how.

Rising above the detailed unfolding of events, it is possible to discern three different templates governing narrative structure in standard accounts of the Trek and mfecane:

The onward march of civilisation;

The growth of a nation;

The advance of the capitalist mode of production.

Naturally, the content of these narrative structures differs according to local circumstances. Here are some examples.

The March of Civilisation

The Trek as the march of civilisation (or, in the words of Albert Grundlingh, 'resilient Afrikanerdom marching inexorably to its predetermined destination as the legitimate rulers over non-Afrikaners in South Africa'⁵) is pictured, not just in the works of historians such as J. A. Wiid, A. J.H. van der Walt and D. W. Kruger, but in the very bricks and stones of the Voortrekker Monument.⁶

The official guide still in use today explains:

[At the gate] assegaais [sic] represent the power of Dingane, who sought to block the path of civilisation . . . [The statue of mother and child] symbolises the civilisation and Christianity that were maintained and developed by the women during the Great Trek. Black wildebeest: symbolise Dingane's warriors, but also the barbarism that yielded to civilisation. Triangular Cornice: Around the top of the Monument is a cornice in a zig-zag pattern. This symbolises fertility. The civilisation brought by the Voortrekkers must grow

. . . The floor of the Hall of Heroes is lined with ever-widening rings of marble . . . which represents ripples after a stone has been cast into the water, become progressively wider until it [sic] fills the entire building. It symbolises the diffusion of the spirit of sacrifice that was generated by the Voortrekkers, and that eventually spread throughout the entire country . . . Flame: symbolises the flame of civilisation in South Africa.⁷

The theme is continued on the panels of the historical frieze that lines the interior. The Voortrekkers, immaculately groomed and dressed, leave the Cape colony with herds and fancy bibles. The land they enter is anything but empty. To possess it they must go into battle (the men wearing coats and ties, the women, their best frocks) against countless savage and deceitful enemies.

The classic stories of the Trek written in English propagate a very different version of the march of civilisation. According to their accounts, the torch of enlightenment carried ashore by Van Riebeeck glowed but dimly in the camps of rude frontiersmen. Out on the veld the volk lost touch with progress, took on the colours of their wild environment and passed on from generation to generation the stunted mentality of Calvinist slaveholders. When British rule stoked up the bonfires of civilisation the trekboers shrank back from the unaccustomed light. With their flocks, bibles ands bondsmen they fled to the wilderness.

Beatrice Webb had this version of history in mind when, in 1899, she called the South African War a clash between the nineteenth century and a 'remnant of seventeenth-century puritanism'.⁸ So did Edgar Brookes 60 years later when he called the Great Trek a reaction 'of the eighteenth century against the nineteenth'.⁹

More than a hint of patronising hauteur creeps into most of the accounts. It resembles in many particulars nineteenth-century stereotypes of the Irish. W.M. Macmillan was not immune:

Under these easy-going and yet arduous conditions, Dutch and Huguenots . . . were welded into South Africans with a predominantly Calvinistic religious tradition, and, for the rest, a love of sun and open spaces, hardy self-reliance, consummate skill in handling a gun, . . . love of independence [which] tended to harden not only into an impatience of Government control, but into an incapacity for co-operation even with his own fellows.¹⁰

Macmillan's student, C.W. de Kiewiet, because he painted with a broader brush, conveyed an even stronger picture of a white tribe in Africa competing with black farmers for the same ecological niche in the environment.¹¹

The opening pages of Eric Walker's The Great Trek read more like anthropology than history. The frontier farmers of the 'thirties were necessarily limited and ignorant of many things. It could not have been otherwise . . . Their knowledge of the older parts of their Colony was apt to be sketchy and, in times of excitement, highly erroneous, while their conception of the outer world was sometimes l00 years out of date . . . Perhaps imagination was deadened by the sameness of the Karoo scenery . . . That attitude pointed to a hereditary preoccupation with concrete, matter of fact, personal things and with not much else.'¹²

It comes as no surprise to the reader to discover later that the root cause of the Trek was 'the steady advance of the forces of regular government' which made life more difficult for 'a stubborn folk who found it far more difficult than it had been to escape from unfamiliar influences by edging away a little farther into the wilds'.¹³

Oliver Ransford's 1972 version of The Great Trek is more extreme. By the end of the eighteenth century, he asserts, 'a new breed of men had evolved in South Africa – the trekboers. No people quite like them had ever existed before'.¹⁴

The state-imposed task of demarcating recognized plots of 6 000 acres is transmuted by Ransford into an animalistic marking of territory:

Their farms usually approximated to the conveniently-managed size (for Africa) of 6 000 acres, and they generally marked out this area in a rough and ready manner by trotting a horse from the wagon along all four points of the compass for half an hour.¹⁵

Ransford explains Afrikaner behaviour partly by genes – 'Trekking was in the blood of these land Vikings' – and partly by the environment – ' these new comers had become as much a part of Africa as its indigenous people and as the Bantu'.¹⁶ These folk, operating not by reason, but by 'instinct', eventually 'reached the happy state of living in balance with nature'.¹⁷ 'Life for them had taken on a special rhythm of its own.'¹⁸ Horse, man, and gun fused into a latter-day centaur:

The men depended on a single weapon the flintlock . . . and a singular style of fighting, charging their perfectly trained horses right up to an enemy group, firing from them without dismounting, retiring to reload, and then returning to repeat the attack. These tactical movements came to them almost naturally . . .¹⁹

The last act in the Anglo version of the march of civilisation is, of course, what Martin Legassick called the frontier tradition in South African history. By a series of flukes – the first Anglo–Boer War, the discovery of gold in the wrong place and Lord Milner's 'magnanimous' peace – the anachronistic ethos of the trekboer and Voortrekker is enshrined in the constitution of the Union, thus delaying for decades the inevitable triumph of modernity.

The Growth of a Nation

Afrikaner nationalists have shown a surprising tolerance for this patronising, virtually racist history. The revisionist enterprise of André du Toit and Hermann Giliomee has made only sluggish headway against the prevailing mythologies.²⁰

The Voortrekker Monument's alternative version enjoys much less visible public support. Why should this be so, when so much ill-concealed ethnic denigration lurks in the Anglo alternative? The answer may lie in the conventions which govern narratives of nationalism. The nation is conceived as the happy, innocent child of the land who is denied his patrimony by sinister forces which must be overcome before the adult can come into his rightful inheritance. An essentialist premise underlying the master narrative is that the nation is a fact of nature on its own soil. This has always been easier to establish in Europe, where the mists of time conveniently obscure historical vision, than in settler colonies whose migratory origins are fulsomely documented.

The myth of the trekboer as child of the South African wilderness overcomes the problem far more elegantly than its counterparts in other settler societies.²¹ It substitutes a shroud of distance for the European shroud of time and answers the challenge of black African nationalism with a white nationalism which claims to be equally African. It lays the foundation for subsequent acts in the drama:

•Persecution by British invaders leading to loss of patrimony and withdrawal into the wilderness (the Great Trek);

•Struggle to reclaim the patrimony marked by incredible suffering (concentration camps in the South African War);

•Triumph of the mature nation (1948 election and proclamation of the Republic).

The only formidable problem remaining for the nationalist historian was to make these key experiences the common property of all who were defined as part of the nation.²² Since an overwhelming majority of Afrikaans-speaking people did not go on the Trek and many of them put their 'hends op' at the time of Anglo-Boer conflict, this was by no means an easy task.²³ It could only be done, as Albert Grundlingh and Hilary Sapire observe – borrowing a phrase from Benedict Anderson – through the construction of an 'imagined community'.²⁴

I do not intend to add to what is already a substantial literature on how the Trek was mythologised, promoted and internalised by twentieth-century Afrikaners. I merely note that the nationalist historiography needed a particular kind of Great Trek and was not interested in exploring alternative versions. The racial slur barely concealed in Anglo versions of the Trek could be forgiven because the idea of a stubborn folk, rooted in the land and unamenable to reform, had an evident political utility.

Advance of the Capitalist Mode of Production

It is worth remarking that the great historiographical revisions of the last two decades, which have demystified and deracialised large chunks of previously standard historiography, have left the Great Trek and mfecane largely untouched. Why? One reason may be that, after the paradigms were set, the dense accumulation of empirical scholarship discouraged newcomers from entering the fray. Every possible piece of evidence appeared already to have been subjected to the most intense scrutiny possible. In addition, some scholars seem to have made a deliberate point of ignoring or downplaying the Trek, implying by their neglect that the really significant forces which shaped modern South Africa are to be found elsewhere.²⁵

It is ironic that Martin Legassick, whose doctoral thesis shed so much new light on the far interior of early nineteenth-century South Africa, announced soon after receiving his degree that it was pointless to look further for the origins of twentieth-century segregation on the frontier.²⁶

Those who heeded his message pulled up their stakes and retreated to the developed regions of the Cape. Those who stayed in the field long enough to contribute to the important collections published in the late 1970s (in Britain by Marks and Atmore, in America by Elphick and Giliomee) did not much disturb established versions of the mfecane or the Great Trek. While David Hedges's new work on trade into the area that became Zululand remained unpublished, Jeff Guy dominated the study of the precolonial Zulu kingdom. Working within the paradigm of a Zulucentric mfecane, he maintained that the kingdom showed remarkable resistance to the penetration of capitalism right up to the time of the Anglo-Zulu War.

Revisionist scholarship concerned with the Cape frontier (which also accepted the Zulucentric mfecane) did not revise liberal and conservative explanations of the Trek; it restated them in new language. Although not every revisionist who touched on the Trek wrote from the theoretical perspective of neo-Marxist scholarship, almost everyone accepted a new working vocabulary focused on relations of production. The result was that the old Anglo version of the Great Trek as a flight from the advancing forces of civilisation was not discarded. It was just dressed up in the latest language. Without too much thought about what it might mean to exclude the Voortrekkers from the realm of capitalist production, they were consigned to a vague precapitalist limbo.

Thus Jeff Peires could assert in the 1989 revised version of The Shaping of South African Society, that 'the central causes of this emigration are commonly agreed on by most historians'. In Peires's restatement, the advancing forces of 'a fully capitalist free market' brought a 'revolution in government' to the Cape after the British annexation. 'The territories north of the Orange and the Vaal Rivers were settled by Cape Afrikaners determined to perpetuate their threatened precapitalist social order.' The British, he writes, brought with them the new conception, 'foreign to both African and Afrikaner farmers, that land was a commodity that could be acquired and sold without ever necessarily being possessed and worked first'.²⁷

Giliomee, rejecting S.D. Neumark's unique attempt of the 1950s to link trekboer expansion to the growth of commodity production, sees Afrikaner frontier rebels as 'poor, landless and desperate colonists' who could not reach the accommodation with British rule achieved by 'wealthier farmers [who] had come to agree that their interests lay in supporting the government'.²⁸

Elphick and Giliomee, summing up what they see to be the dominant view of frontier history among historians at the end of the 1980s, declare that:

In the mid-1830s emigrant Afrikaner farmers, the Voortrekkers, left the eastern regions of the Cape Colony to plant new societies in the interior of southern Africa. In large part they wished to restore the traditional social order of the Cape as they knew it . . . Their successful secession . . . greatly expanded the area of extensive, low-capitalized agriculture . . . [Their] conviction and social realities formed the fateful legacy of the preindustrial Cape to the modern people of South Africa.²⁹

Thus, what the old version of the march of civilisation depicted as a flight of 'seventeenth-century' or 'eighteenth-century' trekboers from the advancing forces of nineteenth-century progress becomes a flight of 'precapitalist' and/or 'pre-industrial' producers from the onrush of a more mature capitalist mode of production. While the denigrating anthropological stereotype of the trekboer is dumped, the underlying narrative structure survives intact in the transition from liberal-humanist to Marxist discourse.

Applying Cobbing's Revisionist Thinking to the Great Trek

All three of the narrative structures I have identified in standard views of the Great Trek are also evident in classic accounts of the mfecane.

The advance of civilisation, again cast in two versions

One version pictures barbarous, virtually self-exterminating peoples pushed on by Zulu izimpi into clearing a place for expanding settlers. The other sees the genius of black invention and statecraft working in isolation to open another dynamic chapter in the constantly changing pageant of African history.

Growth of nations, cast in a form practically identical to the Afrikaner version.

A new nation springs up in secluded valleys north of the Thukela, grows to manhood in the wars of Shaka and Dingane, suffers under the oppression of High Commissioner Bartle Frere and Natal colonists, and struggles towards a rebirth of freedom in a time yet to come. Similar narratives are, with appropriate variations, applied to the new states raised up in the turbulence that followed the rise of the Zulu.

Advance of the capitalist mode of production

The self-sufficient, pre-capitalist political economies of the Zulu state and its Nguni-speaking offshoots seek to resist incorporation into the capitalist system of production but eventually succumb to (or are 'articulated' into) that system as mining and capitalist agriculture demand the 'freeing' of their labour.

The revisionist enterprise begun by Cobbing, and lately joined by John Wright, identifies the same fatal flaw in all three master narratives: the wrong assumption that the Zulu state arose in isolation. Cobbing and Wright hypothesise the previous penetration of both the highveld and the Natal/Zulu kingdom area by trading and raiding enterprises linked to disturbing economic activity at the Cape and Mozambique, which were in turn linked to the developing world economy. This denies neither the dynamism nor the originality of Zulu or other state-builders, but it does reject the idea of primordial nations developing purely in response to their local environments. Neither is there a denial of the importance of relations of production, only a denial that the enterprises of individuals, groups and states were determined in the final instance by the predominant local mode of production. There are also, from at least as early as the second half of the eighteenth century, dynamic, disturbing forces emanating from nearby colonies.

Cobbing and Wright, who see 'mfecane theory' functioning in the interests of definable economic and political interests in the modern South African state, are perfectly aware that their own project reverberates with significance for contemporary political struggles. It challenges long-standing concepts of land rights and the legitimacy of all sorts of claims about the origins and meaning of various ethnic nationalisms. In particular, they notice how Omer-Cooper's formulation of the mfecane was spectacularly misused by F. A. van Jaarsveld in 1971 in an attempt to show that land distribution in contemporary South Africa was historically generated by the black devastations of the early nineteenth century.³⁰ In a single amazing map Van Jaarsveld manages to link imaginary Bantu-speaking migrations from Central Africa in the eighteenth century to both the Great Trek and the Bantustans of the 1960s.

Applying to the Great Trek the kind of thinking Cobbing used to attack the mfecane also has contemporary implications, though of a different sort. Ken Smith has called attention to the way in which the Afrikaner nationalist interpretation of history began to decline from the very moment of its supreme triumph in 1961.³¹ Faced with the growing force of black nationalism at home and anti-apartheid movements abroad, National Party governments sought support from voters of British descent. The anti-British elements in the saga of national achievement were muted. The fiasco of the sesquicentennial celebrations, described by Grundlingh and Sapire, demonstrated that meaning is fast ebbing from the Great Trek. When I visited the Blood River monument in mid-February 1993, my name became the 62nd on the register for the month. Except for the woman serving tea I had the battlefield to myself. Plummeting enrolments in the history departments of the Afrikaans-medium universities suggest that a whole generation is fleeing the past.

One of the most interesting passages in E.H. Carr's eternally youthful What is History? is his analysis of the process by which a 'fact about the past' becomes an 'historical fact'. His illustration of the gingerbread vendor kicked to death by an angry mob in 1850 is meant to show that what one historian seizes upon as a 'fact' of great significance becomes an 'historical fact' only when other professionals accept the claim and write it into their own books.³²

Because Carr, for all his relativism, believed in the project of cumulative historical knowledge, he did not contemplate the possibility that an historical fact might slip back into the primeval ooze of facts about the past. Something of the sort had been foreseen by F. F. J. Muller when he predicted in 1963 that if white South Africa disappeared as a political factor 'the Great Trek would be seen as merely a brief era of white imperialism that moved up from the Cape as far as the Limpopo or Zambezi Rivers'.³³

The remainder of this essay speculates on what the meaning of the Trek may be for historians if we forsake old narratives and reshape the Great Trek to mesh with the new understanding Cobbing and Wright have brought to the mfecane.

Cobbing, like many other historians writing in the last decade, abandons the idea that analysis of a particular economy should be keyed completely to the locally dominant mode of production.³⁴ By cutting loose from the notion that the starting point for the study of any society is a scrutiny of the predominant internal forces and relations of production, he can see a variety of factors at work. It seems to me unnecessary to ask whether slaving or trade was the external force that provoked the ingenious creation of the Zulu state. Trading and slaving, hunting, climatic change and labour-raiding can all be incorporated into a larger picture of defensive reactions and novel opportunities stirring the African people of the southern African interior toward the end of the eighteenth century.

Applying a similar breadth of vision to the Trek requires in the first instance little more than picking up where Legassick left off in 1970, on a frontier where a range of economic activities overlapped, and where no clear delineation of a person's role in production could be made on the basis of colour alone. The change in perspective which is needed can be illustrated quite simply by considering two of the maps that appear in the 1989 edition of The Shaping of South African Society.³⁵

Several threatening black arrows thrust east and north from the Zulu kingdom. Others, even more menacing, which push south-west from the highveld are countered by a single grey counterthrust of Voortrekker movement. Cobbing and Wright ask us to reverse the direction of most of the arrows. A new map drawn to their specifications would show the Great Trek as only the latest in a series of invasive forces.

A second obvious step is to challenge the enduring view of the trekkers as pre-capitalist, eighteenth-century white nomads in flight from modernising British rule. Five decades have passed since the work of P. J. van der Merwe exposed the fallacy of identifying the trekboer with the Voortrekker, but still the stereotype lives on.³⁶

Building on Van der Merwe's work, Timothy Keegan has, in a few short but suggestive paragraphs at the beginning of a recent article, taken an important step toward resituating the Voortrekkers in the capitalist economy of the eastern Cape.³⁷

Neumark may have been wrong to single out wool production as the contribution of the Voortrekker in carrying commodity production into the interior. But why should the opposite therefore be assumed to be true – that the trekkers had no intentions other than to establish themselves as self-sufficient, precapitalist agriculturists?

More needs to be done to relate the Voortrekkers to the frontiersmen who went ahead of them – not just pioneers in trans-Orangia, but also the Griqua. Legassick and Robert Ross, in complementary studies, have shown how the Griqua shifted among different kinds of economic activities and how their willingness to consider land as a commodity gradually undermined their position in Griqualand West.³⁸

In Cobbing's version of the mfecane, the Griqua are just one of several fearsome advance guards of the world economy. We should perhaps take Hendrik Potgieter precisely at his word when he tells Adam Kok, 'We are emigrants together with you . . . who together with you dwell in the same strange land and we desire to be regarded as neither more nor less than your fellow-emigrants, inhabitants of the country, enjoying the same privileges with you.'³⁹

Taken literally, this envisaged a life in which hunting for game, cattle and people would be regular events.

To what extent slaving as well as slave-holding were on the agenda of individual Voortrekkers is hard to tell. We have the testimony of J.N. Boshof in 1838 that 'it was the intention at first to proceed far into the interior, with the view to settle in the vicinity of Delagoa Bay, for the purpose of carrying on a trade with the inhabitants of that settlement' .⁴⁰

The harrowing journey of the Tregardt party revealed the hazards of that enterprise, but why were the allegedly pre-capitalist Voortrekkers making for a Portuguese port? The project sometimes attributed to them of securing access to the sea for Paul Kruger' s future republic is ridiculously anachronistic and contradicts the idea that they only wanted to be alone in their wilderness. If participation in the east African slave and slaving economy was on their agenda, they had, of course, to shut up about it. Nothing would be more likely to send the furies of Exeter Hall chasing after them. Naturally all such intentions are denied in Piet Retief's celebrated manifesto which has so often been scoured for meaning. However, scholars who have recently looked at what was done in the Zoutpansberg after the Trek have had little trouble in confirming that hunting for game and children went hand in hand.⁴¹

Retief's apologia has been too often taken at face value. As Du Toit and Giliomee point out, it needs to be read against the grain.⁴² Retief notoriously led the trekkers from behind, joining up in 1837. He had the benefit of judging the reaction of public opinion in Britain and at the Cape when he took up his pen to write to the Graham's Town Journal. The text was taken with more than a grain of salt by the Commercial Advertiser, who smiled at the idea that the 'Farmers have been induced to withdraw from under a settled Christian Government, to seek a "quiet life" among the gentle kings of central Africa.'⁴³

In view of Retief's own background, however, activities other than slaving were likely to have been foremost in his mind. Like Louis Tregardt and other Voortrekker leaders, he was anything but a self-sufficient trekboer. He was a businessman, a government contractor of dubious integrity and a land speculator.⁴⁴

His experience with the 1820 settlers had shown him all the myriad ways in which money could be made out of pioneering. From the time Graham cleared the Zuurveld, the acquisition and transfer of land in marketable parcels had been a regular feature of frontier life – a fact obscured by the legend of trekboers living on vaguely defined tracts out of sight of their neighbours' chimneys. No account of the Trek has ever ignored land hunger as a cause of the emigration, but the kind of emphasis Giliomee puts on the 'poor, landless and desperate' rebels who followed behind a few well-off leaders has, no doubt, discouraged historians from considering that the Trek had anything to do with land speculation. In the settlement of nineteenth-century colonies in 'new lands' around the globe, the speculative hopes of a few were more often than not grounded on the prospects they could hold out to landless migrants. Before the Homestead Act in the United States and selection acts in Canada and Australia regularised the process of land grants to poor farmers, the work of laying out new settlements was generally carried on by private contractors who hoped to profit from resales, particularly of town acres. Could Retief have so left his past behind him as to be blind to such prospects in 1837?

The best evidence about the trekkers' intentions is to be found in the way they handled land in the republics which they founded. The fact that a man found among the trekkers with surveying tools was almost killed as a government spy is not an indication that they were against surveying.⁴⁵ It shows not only their objection to the British land regulations, but also their intention that nothing should interfere in any way with their reaping the full benefit of whatever annexations they should succeed in making. Retief in a sense dies for the cause of land speculation, leaving behind him in his knapsack the deed of cession from Dingane that would protect Voortrekkers in Natal from other claimants, especially the British traders at Port Natal. (Retief had already assured the latter of special consideration in the matter of land grants.⁴⁶)

Much of the work of the Natal Volksraad was taken up with land business. Boshof supplied the expertise in law-making that was lost through the death of Retief, and the new state speedily demonstrated its intention of raising most of its revenue through the sale of land. As Walker noticed, Boshof 'worked hard to regularise the land laws and to push on with systematic and genuine settlement, the closer the better'.⁴⁷

There was nothing like a vague marking out of vast tracts by riding horses to the four points of the compass. Town acres in Pietermaritzburg were dispensed on the same system that applied in Adelaide (contemporary capital of the thoroughly modern, 'systematic colony' of South Australia), through the drawing of lots.⁴⁸ At Port Natal, town plots were sold outright.

Land claimants showed far more sophistication than legend ascribes to them. Far from being satisfied with one 6 000-acre farm per family, 'men went on staking claims right down to the Umzimvubu and far beyond the Tugela, in the lands claimed by Panda and Faku. Soon 1 800 farms had been staked out, two or three for each family and the rest by unattached men . . .'.⁴⁹ Similar scenes were enacted on the highveld. Potchefstroom had for a time not one registrar of land titles, but two, competing against one another.⁵⁰

The keeping of records may have been haphazard, the resources of administration inadequate, and the officials inept, but, in all the new republics, dealing in land as a commodity was fundamental to the enterprise of settlement. It would, of course, be decades before speculative profits were reaped in most parts of the interior. It would also be some time before the staples of production were identified through experiment and market-place demands. But to deny that commodity production was prominent on the agenda of the trekkers – especially the leaders – misunderstands the way new lands were brought into production by Europeans and North Americans in the nineteenth century. Prohibitions against black ownership of land in the new republics were certainly grounded in concepts of inequality, but, like restrictions on the rights of white newcomers to acquire land on the same basis as the founding burghers, they were also a device to maximise speculative gains for the pioneers. Through all the crises of the Transvaal up to the annexation of 1877, control of land dealing was crucial to the shaky operations of the state.⁵¹

The colonising of the new territory by the Great Trek shared many features in common with contemporaneous outward movements in other parts of the world. Following the Napoleonic Wars, population growth, booming demand for agricultural commodities, and improvements in transportation and storage led to the seizure of land from old indigenous owners. In every case these movements marked out land for sale or lease. This was so in the Louisiana territory, Texas, Oregon, Algeria, New Zealand and Australia. The Trek began in the same year that Wakefield's South Australia Company surveyed its capital and the Texas Republic seized its independence from Mexico. Historians have ignored this conjuncture and clung to concepts of South African exceptionalism embodied in the master narratives analysed earlier in this essay. From Macmillan and Walker to Du Toit, Peires and Giliomee, historians have tenaciously insisted that the Trek was a reactive and conservative movement.⁵²

This deserves to be questioned.

From the 1820s the annexation of Natal had been contemplated by speculative commercial minds at the Cape.⁵³ The trekkers made a pre-emptive strike. No doubt the business would have been more neatly managed by the British Empire, but after their own fashion the trekkers did the job. They had some peculiar reasons for wanting to escape from British rule, but so had the Mormon founders of Utah some peculiar reasons to escape from Yankee rule. So had Silesian migrants who took up land in South Australia. Those peculiarities should not blind us to the fact that Utah, South Australia and the Orange Free State shared ideas about the owning, farming and selling of land.

Andries Stockenstrom, the archetypal progressive Afrikaner, is remembered by liberals (and excoriated by nationalists) as the opponent of the Trek, but it should be remembered that his preferred policy was not a closed frontier. It was systematic 'colonization of all depopulated territories' .⁵⁴ That is to say, he would have preferred a thorough job done by British rule to the half-botched job done by the trekkers.

Daniel Lindley, the American missionary eye-witness to the Trek, regretted the ignorance of the pioneers, but did not doubt that they represented the same outward movement of invasive migration that had taken place in Indian territories in the land of his birth.⁵⁵

Neither did the Voortrekkers. Piet Uys affirmed in 1838 that he and his fellows proposed 'to establish our settlement on the same principles of liberty as those adopted by the United States of America'. The Lydenburg Republic's executive in 1860 cited in defence of their record of colonisation not only the ancient Israelites but also the European colonisers of Asia, America and Australia.⁵⁶

Cobbing argues that we should shift our conception of the mfecane from an aggressive movement sparked off by the Zulu to a period of turbulence resulting from a stepping up of intrusive forces stemming from the advance agents of the world economy. A corollary shift is required in thinking about the Great Trek. The trekkers were part of the intrusive process, not weird anachronisms in flight from it. The mfecane had not depopulated Natal and the highveld. It had rendered certain sections free of obvious owners and therefore available for partition in a typical early nineteenth-century scheme of settlement. The trekkers were not merely reacting to British restrictions. Advance guards speaking their language had gone ahead of them. They did not walk backwards into an empty land.

1.J. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', Journal of African History, 29(1988), 487–519.

2.J. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa, London, 1966; R.K. Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom: Mzilikazi's Ndebele in South Africa, London, 1978.

3.J.B. Peires, ed., Before and After Shaka: Papers in Nguni History, Grahamstown, 1981, 1; E. A. Walker, The Great Trek, London, 1938, 2nd ed., ix.

4.C. W. de Kiewiet is the most notable exception.

5.A.M. Grundlingh, 'Politics, Principles and Problems of a Profession: Afrikaner Historians and their Discipline, c. 1920–1965', Perspectives in Education, 12 (1990), 1–19.

6.See K. Smith's discussion in The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing, Athens, Ohio, 1988, 73. See also A. Grundlingh on the influence of H.B. Thom on Stellenbosch, in 'Politics, Principles and Problems'

7.D. Heymans, The Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, 1986.

8.B. Webb, writing in Fabian News, (10 October 1899), 188.

9.E. Brookes, Apartheid: A Documentary Study of Modern South Africa, London, 1968, xx.

10.W. M. Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem, London, 1929, 2 5 .

11.C.W. de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic, London, 1941, 58: 'In one sense the Great Trek was the eighteenth century fleeing before its more material, more active, and better organized successor'.

12.E.A. Walker, The Great Trek, London, 1934, 48–9 (my italics).

13.Walker, The Great Trek, 67; Walker's invocation of the forces of regular government' is quite close to Jeff Peires's much more recent emphasis on 'the revolution in government' which British rule brought to the Cape. See Peires 'The British and the Cape' in R. Elphick and H. B. Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, Cape Town, 1989.

14.O. Ransford, The Great Trek, London, 1974, 13.

15.Ransford, The Great Trek, 16.

16.Ransford, The Great Trek, 16, 17, (my italics).

17.Ransford, The Great Trek, 18, 19.

18.Ransford, The Great Trek, 20.

19.Ransford, The Great Trek, 21, (my italics).

20.A. du Toit, 'No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology', American Historical Review, 88 (1983), 920–52; A. du Toit and H.B. Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought: Analysis and Documents, 2 vols, Berkeley, 1983. See also Smith, The Changing Past, 96–8.

21.Similar problems were faced and solved by equally suspect devices. The Quebecois are mythologized as woodsmen in a fashion similar to the Afrikaners. Alternative methods naturalised the pieds noirs settlers of Algeria and the Australian colonists. Daniel Boorstin and others have pointed to the way in which a fictive 'true American', supposedly in existence by the time of the Revolution, challenged later 'unnatural' European migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I would also like to emphasise that I accept that people who make homes for themselves on and beyond the frontier had to adapt to local realities. In one sense the trekboers were indeed 'Africanized'. The point 1 am making is that nationalist narratives ascribe a single set of characteristics to the founding sons of the soil which are then attributed to their 'descendants'.

22.Peter Novick, in the unpublished paper 'Why Dan Quayle was Right', presented to the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, July 1991, has traced the way American Jews managed to assimilate the experience of the holocaust even though their nation had fought against Hitler.

23.On the Afrikaner collaborators see A.M. Grundlingh, Die 'Hensoppers' en 'Joiners': Die Rasionaal en Verskynsel van Verraad, Cape Town and Pretoria, 1979.

24.A.M. Grundlingh and H. Sapire, 'From Feverish Festival to Repetitive Ritual? The Changing Fortunes of Great Trek Mythology in an Industrializing South Africa, 1938–1988', South African Historical Journal, 21 (1989), 19–37.

25.As an example, Dan O'Meara managed to write Volkskapitalisme, a book with the subtitle, Class, Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948, Johannesburg, 1983, with only a couple of small references to the Great Trek (see 71, 76). In John Pampallis's Foundations of the New South Africa, London, 1991, the Great Trek gets two sentences on page 38.

26.M. Legassick, 'The Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography', Collected Seminar Papers on the Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 2, London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1971, 1–33. In 1985 John D. Omer-Cooper protested against the abandonment of frontier studies as aids to the understanding of twentieth-century segregation in 'The South African Frontier Revisited', paper presented at a conference of the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific, Melbourne, 1985.

27.Peires, 'The British and the Cape', esp. 4 7 2 , 480, 499, 511.

28.'The Eastern Frontier, 1770–1812' in Elphick and Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 450. S.D. Neumark's ideas appear in Economic Influences on the South African Frontier, Stanford, 1957.

29.Concluding paragraph of Elphick and Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 560–1.

30.F. A. van Jaarsveld, Van Van Riebeeck tot Verwoerd, 1652–1966, Johannesburg, 1971, 114–5. A similar use of the mfecane is made by C. F. J. Muller in Die Oorsprong van die Groot Trek, Cape Town, 1974, in which the mfecane becomes one more factor disturbing the 'security' of white frontier farmers on the Cape eastern frontier: see especially 94–104.

31.Smith, The Changing Past, 90–2.

32.E.H. Carr, What is History?, London, 1961, 12.

33.Quoted in Smith, The Changing Past, 71.

34.He is not alone in this; African historians have been dumping mode of production analysis in increasing numbers since the early 1980s. See the special issue devoted to the question by the Canadian Journal of African Studies, 19, 1 (1985). See also my discussion of Peires, ed., Before and After Shaka in the Journal of Southern African Studies, 3 (1984), 157–61.

35.Figures 8.4 and 8.2 in Elphick and Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society.

36.P. J. van der Merwe, Die Noordwaartse Beweging van die Boere voor die Groot Trek 1770–1842, The Hague, 1937. See the discussion of this point in Smith, The Changing Past, 76–7.

37.T. Keegan, 'The Making of the Orange Free State, 1846–54: Sub-Imperialism, Primitive Accumulation and State Formation', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17, 1 (1988), 26–8.

38.R. Ross, Adam Kok's Griqua, Cambridge, 1976, 134.

39.Quoted by Peires in Elphick and Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 508. See also Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 172: 'The presence of the Griquas helps in part to explain why it was that from the very beginning the mass of the trekkers moved so far away, instead of planting their secession states on the reputedly "empty" land immediately adjoining the parent Colony.'

40.Quoted in Ransford, The Great Trek, 99.

41.See, for example, J. Boeyens, "'Zwart Ivoor": Inboekelinge in Zoutpansberg, 1848–1869', Suid-Afrikaanse Historiese Joernaal, 24 (1991), 31–66.

42.Du Toit and Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought, vol. 1, 213.

43.M. Streak, The Afrikaner as Viewed by the English 1795–1854, Cape Town, 1974, 158.

44.Peires, eager to make his point about the 'revolution in government' brought by the British de-emphasizes Retief's land speculations in order to point up the way he carried on into the nineteenth century manipulations of government characteristic of the Dutch East India Company ( VOC) past. See Elphick and Giliomee, The Shaping of South African Society, 508–10.

45.Elphick and Giliomee, The Shaping of South African Society, 504.

46.Walker, The Great Trek, 154.

47.Walker, The Great Trek, 248.

48.Walker, The Great Trek, 220.

49.Walker, The Great Trek, 249.

50.Walker, The Great Trek, 247.

51.The work of Peter Delius on the relationship of the Pedi polity to the Transvaal government is especially revealing. See The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-century Transvaal, Johannesburg, 1983.

52.This is true even of De Kiewiet, who noticed in A History of South Africa, 57, that 'between the exodus of the Boers and other colonizing movements in the nineteenth century similarities are easily discerned'. None the less, he too insisted that the 'Boers moved inland not to found a new society and to win new wealth . . . theirs was not the aggressive movement of a people braving the wilderness for the profit that it would bring their purses, or the education that it would give their children', 58–9.

53.J.B. Wright, 'Political Mythology and the Making of Natal's Mfecane', Canadian Journal of African Studies, 23, 2(1989), 272–91.

54.Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 235n.

55.Houghton Library, Harvard University, Archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, folio 15.4, vol.2, D. Lindley to Rufus Anderson, 27 March 1838.

56.Du Toit and Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought, vol. 1, 228, 284.